Live Event Monitoring Gets A Major Boost When Geofencing Meets Emotional Response Rate

Alan Wolk
, ContributorI cover the future of television, from broadcast to digital to socialOpinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

Television networks have been making use of social media for some time now in order to understand a world of consumer behavior, everything from what plot lines viewers react to, to what actors are most popular to who their super fans are and what other shows and products those super fans like.

The one place TV has had a blind spot, however, has been around live events. Unlike the people tweeting and posting about TV shows, a good portion of the audience at live events are not social media “pros” and, as such, tend to omit hashtags or even actual mentions of the name of the event they’re posting about.

That’s largely because they are posting for different audiences. TV show superfans are posting for other superfans or for the general public, while fans at live events are posting for their families and friends. That’s one reason why the former are heavier Twitter users, Twitter being a largely public forum, while the latter, the live event attendees, are mostly posting on Instagram, which, for most users, is a place they share their lives with family and friends.

That disparity only served to highlight a problem many marketers have with all those hashtagged tweets: they are coming from an overly invested segment of the audience that is not representative of the audience as a whole.

This was an issue for producers of live events, as the voices that got picked up by most monitoring services were the voices of social media pros. That did not prove helpful for producers of these live events, who had but one chance to get things right.

Fortunately, a new(ish) product, a combo actually, from two companies called Ampsy and Canvs, might be the ticket live event producers have been looking for. (Pun intended.)

Ampsy provides geofenced social media tracking. That means they are able to define a specific location—a stadium, a concert hall, even a hotel ballroom, and collect all of the tweets and posts coming from that site.